FinTech Weekly Summary

So by now, I think we all have heard of the blockchain, ethereum, bitcoin also known as the ‘crypto’ industry. It is growing big. It will grow even bigger, however, like with any growth story, there are crucial challenges that have to be overcome. One particular challenge is scaling. Fred Ehrsam in his post ‘Scaling Ethereum to Billions of Users’:

“Everything will be tokenized and connected by a blockchain one day. Scalability is the crux of that journey at the moment. Ethereum is orders of magnitude off from being able to support applications with millions of users at the moment. Yet in true decentralized fashion, there are a diverse set of efforts attempting to solve that problem. The biggest bottleneck to solving scalability is the number of people working on the problem. If current efforts are well-executed, Ethereum could be ready for a 1–10m user app by the end of 2018.”

There are a number of efforts that are underway to solve this conundrum, but they take it and have some of the smartest people on the planet working on them. What is best is that we finally have a way to monetise and reward these efforts – crypto tokens. As Chris Dixon puts it:

“Crypto tokens are currently niche and controversial. If present trends continue, they will soon be seen as a breakthrough in the design and development of open networks, combining the societal benefits of open protocols with the financial and architectural benefits of proprietary networks. They are also an extremely promising development for those hoping to keep the internet accessible to entrepreneurs, developers, and other independent creators.”

All these new advancements in the crypto sector have drawn a lot of media attention. And investors. The value of bitcoin has soared more than 200% in recent months. Even The Economist, a rather conservative magazine, often features articles on cryptocurrency and bitcoin. Recently, The Economist has raised a very valid question – more often than not, the word “bitcoin” now comes attached to the word “bubble”. But the question of what has driven up the price is important. Is this just a speculative mania, or is it evidence that bitcoin is taking on a more substantial role as a medium of exchange or a store of value?

There are other big challenges too, particularly computing power. And when it comes to computing power, the next big thing is quantum computing and Moore’s law. Vijay Pande explains how Moore’s law will be even more effectively:

“Classical computers thrive on the curve of Moore’s law, with performance roughly doubling every year; after n years, classical computers are 2^n times faster. This means we’ve seen roughly a 1000x increase in computing power in under a decade. In the quantum hyperscaling Moore’s Law, the speed of a quantum computer is exponential in the number of coherent quantum elements or “qubits” — that is, 2^q. But successfully incorporating technological advances in using silicon technology would enable the qubits themselves to follow Moore’s law (q = 2^n)… making the resulting performance power of the quantum computer 2^2^n. This means that the performance of quantum computing is exponentially more rapid than Moore’s Law. It’s as if Moore’s law itself sped up like Moore’s law.”

Finally, the use of the ‘crypto’ infrastructure will go far beyond financial transactions. Chris Dixon has written previously:

“Bitcoin was introduced in 2008 with the publication of Satoshi Nakamoto’s landmark paper that proposed a novel, decentralized payment system built on an underlying technology now known as a blockchain. Most fans of Bitcoin (including me) mistakenly thought Bitcoin was solely a breakthrough in financial technology. (It was easy to make this mistake: Nakamoto himself called it a “p2p payment system.”) In retrospect, Bitcoin was really two innovations: 1) a store of value for people who wanted an alternative to the existing financial system, and 2) a new way to develop open networks. Tokens unbundle the latter innovation from the former, providing a general method for designing and growing open networks.”

AI has reached has finally reached its tipping point.“The technology has finally reached its tipping point, AI, and its close relative machine learning, have taken a variety of industries by storm, bringing self-driving Ubers to the streets of San Francisco (and then carting them away); robotic vacuum cleaners to dirty household floors; and natural language processing to chat bots and IVR communications. With AI already embedded into these industries, it’s easy to find examples of how the technology is shaping fintech.” – A Fintech Filter for Artificial Intelligence in 2017 by Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz)

The goal of AI is not to replace the human in the first place, but rather to remove the repetitive and time-consuming robot-like tasks from the stack and to empower the insurer to be more human again. “To make reliable predictions AI needs, apart from a clearly formulated question, are masses of clean data to learn from, highlighting another challenge for insurers, namely data quality, privacy issues and the integration into legacy systems. It is easy to let these challenges cloud our sight for the opportunities that lie ahead. With AI we can automate major parts of the process. The goal is not to replace the human in the first place, but rather to remove the repetitive and time-consuming robot-like tasks from the stack and to empower the insurer to be more human again.” – Artificial Intelligence: the new kid in town by Insurers.AI

Even though AI feels like it’s going mainstream, consumers don’t yet fully trust it.“Artificial intelligence is booming. The success of Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers show there is a healthy appetite for AI assistance. Autonomous, self-driving cars are in being tested by the likes of Google and Tesla. AI-powered platforms such as IBM Watson and Wipro Holmes are able to diagnose cancer, analyze retail data, and communicate through ordinary spoken and written language. But even though AI feels like it’s going mainstream, consumers don’t yet fully trust it. A study of more than 12,000 people in 11 countries reveals that people aren’t quite ready to surrender control to silicone and microchips. Research reveals a lack of understanding and trust in fintech that is stalling mainstream adoption of innovative new services which could make millions of people’s daily lives simpler and more secure.” – Rise of the Machines? Consumers Say They Don’t Trust Financial AI By Jeffry Pilcher

The real threat of artificial intelligence is not a cyborg armageddon but unprecedented economic inequalities and even altering the global balance of power.“Too often the answer to this question resembles the plot of a sci-fi thriller. People worry that developments in A.I. will bring about the “singularity” — that point in history when A.I. surpasses human intelligence, leading to an unimaginable revolution in human affairs. These are interesting issues to contemplate, but they are not pressing. They concern situations that may not arise for hundreds of years, if ever. At the moment, there is no known path from our best A.I. tools (like the Google computer program that recently beat the world’s best player of the game of Go) to “general” A.I. — self-aware computer programs that can engage in common-sense reasoning, attain knowledge in multiple domains, feel, express and understand emotions and so on. This doesn’t mean we have nothing to worry about. On the contrary, the A.I. products that now exist are improving faster than most people realize and promise to radically transform our world, not always for the better. They are only tools, not a competing form of intelligence. But they will reshape what work means and how wealth is created, leading to unprecedented economic inequalities and even altering the global balance of power. Or to put the matter more optimistically: A.I. is presenting us with an opportunity to rethink economic inequality on a global scale. These challenges are too far-ranging in their effects for any nation to isolate itself from the rest of the world.” – The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence by By Kai-Fu Lee

Cryptocurrency is becoming somewhat of a hot buzzword these days, however, I think it can go beyond the buzz and add real value (see the summaries below). There are many industries that it will impact directly, one great example would be law or peer-to-peer (P2P) industry. However, one thing we understand little of still is the second/third level impacts that it will bring, i.e. how a more modern/flexible law system will affect our lives or decentralised P2P system (i.e. Airbnb/Ebay/Uber) will transform the way we transact. Are people even going to own houses or a smart contract will manage the crowdsourced ownership and it will be rented out Airbnb-style with the profits shared among many ‘investors’ that is easily tradable? This would change property as an asset class dramatically, transforming it from a very illiquid to extremely liquid investment.

Facebook, Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber all played a role in shaping the way people view the world. They made it normal to share moments and thoughts online. They taught us that it’s okay to hop into a stranger’s car or even sleep in their spare bedroom. They forever changed the way we purchase goods and services from one another. And I believe that blockchain technology will be the next innovation that changes the way we think about and interact with the internet. I believe that Ethereum has the potential to overtake Bitcoin as the digital currency and framework of the future because of its strong developer ecosystem, coding simplicity, and the variety of applications that can utilize smart contracts.

Despite the incredible amount of attention and material written about cryptocurrency tokens, there hasn’t been a good mainstream definition of what they are. In the technical realm of the blockchain, the concept of a cryptocurrency token is well understood. It represents a programmable currency unit that is bolted to a blockchain, and is part of smart contract logic in the context of a specific software application. But in the non-technical arena, what is a token, really? A token is just another term for a type of privately issued currency. Traditionally, sovereign governments issued currency and set its terms and governance; in essence directing how our economy works with money as the exchange medium for value. With the blockchain, we now have new types organizations (and soon, more of the existing type) who are issuing their own currency in the form of digital money as cryptocurrency, and they are setting their own terms and rules around its operations, in essence creating new self-sustainable mini-economies. A unit of value that an organization creates to self-govern its business model, and empower its users to interact with its products, while facilitating the distribution and sharing of rewards and benefits to all of its stakeholders.

Universal Basic Income is essential to getting from the Industrial Age into the Knowledge Age. Basic income gives people economic freedom, which is essential if we want them to freely allocate their attention. Much of the writing on that to date, including my own, has taken the approach of looking at existing budgets and figuring out how to rearrange them. That, however, is thinking too narrowly. Instead, I am now convinced that the right way to implement a Basic Income is through changing how money is created. At present most industrial economies use some form of fractional reserve banking. Commercial banks can create extra “money” in the economy in the form of credit as they only need to keep a fraction of their deposits as a reserve. Central banks have also used other mechanisms to provide liquidity to commercial banks, especially following the 2008 financial crisis. An alternative approach would be to move money creation the individual level by issuing a basic income. This is variously referred to as helicopter money and quantitative easing for the people. One exciting potential of crypto currencies is that they could make it much easier to build such a system.

At Coinbase, our mission is to create an open financial system for the world. We believe that open protocols for money will create more innovation, economic freedom, and equality of opportunity in the world, just like the internet did for publishing information. However, an open financial system is difficult to get started because it requires a network effect. Every transaction requires both a sender and recipient who are willing to use the new system. To overcome this, our strategy is to draw new users into the digital currency space via an initial use case (investment, or currency speculation) that does not require a network effect. This will create the critical mass of people required for the network effect to develop.

It’s hard for big companies to innovate incrementally because the process often feels slow and, nearly, meaningless. There are no ‘big wins’, at least not done quickly. Repainting your house the same color it already was feels like a waste. It’s a lot of effort merely to keep things as they are. Minor updates feel like repainting your house but they matter because once you need a big update it may prove a mountain too high to climb. But if you don’t do it, time and entropy kick in and the house starts to fade.

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As an investor, the more meaningful fintech opportunities I see on the horizon center around enabling a new truth equilibrium. This is why core banking systems or policy management systems for insurers are so exciting. This is why digital sovereignty – digital identity schemes, privacy schemes applying equally as direct to consumer solutions and b2b solutions – are so exciting. This is why distributed ledger or blockchain tech is so exciting, when appropriate. This is why solutions that allow us to make sense (truth) of data such as new generation data marketplaces are so exciting. Any and all of these hold the promise of anchoring us with new truths we can trust. Therein lies the real signal. The efficiency part is only noise.

Embrace technology and change the boardroom. Banks are led by bankers, but banks are fintech firms too. Banks should, therefore, have a good balance of technologists and bankers in the boardroom. If a bank’s leadership team cannot understand the difference between machine learning and deep learning, or between blockchain and a distributed ledger, how can they possibly lead the bank into this digital future?

The traditional merchant acquirer will transmute into a Merchant Service Provider (MSP), fits within this narrative. I can see that merchants want value-added services, a great many of which depend on collecting and analysing large quantities of data rather than just “cost plus” payment processing. What’s more, as the cost of payments heads toward zero, nodes in the value chain will have to provide those value-added services or be bypassed. So, will Visa and MasterCard be bypassed by open banking? If they do nothing, then yes. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Alipay and others will simply go directly to consumer payment accounts via APIs, and payments will begin to drift away from the 8,583 rails put in place over many years. But they won’t do anything.

InsurTech is finally catching-on. The industry has only recently woken up to the many opportunities that new technology offers and now we’re seeing more firms investigating what phones and apps can do for them. But the insurance industry is just catching up with its customers. Consumers, used to seamless experiences from many of their interactions, are expecting to see it from their insurance companies too. The big, established players, in particular, have recognised the need to embrace new technologies to remain relevant and engage with customers. This is more crucial than ever as new players have entered the field, all with an eye on the prize. Jumping on the digital bandwagon is no longer an option – but a necessity for all insurance companies – no matter their size.

It’s very difficult for banks to change. There are many external factors to overcome – regulation, customer expectations, competition, internal complexity. However, the biggest factor is the mindset. Lack of leadership belief is the biggest break in the process. The reason it’s difficult to learn something new is that it will change you into someone who disagrees with the person you used to be. Changing direction requires admitting that you were going in off course in the first place.

The importance of a well-defined, articulated and acted upon purpose has never been more important for a financial services organization. Unfortunately, most financial institutions lack an underlying purpose or lack the commitment from top management that motivates both employees and customers. Some organisations do little more than express their purpose as if it was an ad slogan that is changed with the seasons. Some purpose statements lack differentiation and could easily be used by other financial organisations or firms in other industries. Some purpose statements are more similar to a ‘wish list’, with no real connection to where a firm is or where it can effectively go in the future. Finally, there are those banks or credit unions that create an effective purpose statement, only to do nothing to support the purpose on a daily basis to employees or customers.

In an API world where data is currency and a customer-centric experience is king, banks are lagging behind the tech titans. However, the advent of open banking legislation may just force the hand of banks to innovate around the customer before tech firms enter the financial services market. Banks should look at APIs as a way to enhance service offerings, improve customer engagement, increase digital revenues and build partnership models with fintech while ensuring regulatory and data guardrails are in place. There is an unprecedented opportunity for banks to make every customer interaction more seamless and strengthen their partnership ecosystems by building a core API strategy.

The evolution of the customer service in traditional banking was very slow during the past few decades. One of the milestones in that matter was probably the invention of the ATM in 1967 for the automation of bank-teller operations. Then the customer support in branches started to migrate to telephone banking, followed by the smartphone era that changed the approach of banks in dealing with customers. Mobile technologies have significantly affected the financial services industry, forcing institutional players to tailor their businesses to survive in the mobile-first environment. Innovation in customer service is becoming a huge priority for banks; the world today is changing rapidly and everything we know is getting digitised.

Today’s waves of cyberattacks may be coming on too fast for the best computer scientists to unravel fast enough to stop their spread across connected networks. If anything, the recent ransomware attacks that shook up many of the world’s IT systems highlights the need for insurers to work even harder — and smarter — to batten down their hatches. More money is part of the solution, and there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of that going into security efforts. But throwing more money at the problem will only be feeding a black hole which will keep demanding more dollars, euros, pounds or rupees. Insurers need to get smarter about their cybersecurity as well. Looking at their own protective requirements, connected insurers face increasing threats that need to be addressed aggressively.

Ever increasing quantity of data provides us with more and more options to drive new insights. Companies are jumping on the big data bandwagon and, rightly so, trying to find new ways to improve their services and offerings. However, at a time when information is so abundant that we can get the answer to any question, the real responsibility becomes asking the right question.

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Technology continues to impact the banking industry, as more and more transactions move from physical to digital channels. The application of big data insights and advanced analytics (machine learning) has changed the internal operations, external experiences and competitive battlefield in financial services. With so much change, banks and credit unions are rethinking their business models for the future. While there are many important technological trends impacting the banking industry, none may be more important than artificial intelligence (AI) and the ability to use data, advanced analytics and digital technology to deliver a better customer experience. The number one trend around artificial intelligence is underscored by the fact that bankers believe artificial intelligence (AI) will ‘revolutionize the way banks gather information and interact with customers.’ This is in line with the findings from other industries, where the application of big data and machine learning is expected to provide a better understanding of customer beliefs and intentions, enabling enhanced customer experiences and better competitive positioning.

Banks across the globe are anxiously looking at the slow but seemingly inexorable progress of banking APIs. Regulation and market demands will require banks and other financial services firms to make it easy for another firm to gain access to their customers’ data, and to engage with their platforms to transact. Most realise that the world of financial services is going to be shaken to its foundations by their arrival. Banking APIs will usher a completely new era for banking. Financial services firms will have to accept a reality where their most valuable asset – their customers’ data – is now controlled by customers themselves. This may not be the end for the big banks and financial institutions, but it’s definitely a very different world from what they’re used to.

Larry Summers, former director of the National Economic Council for President Barack Obama, writes a regular column in The Financial Times. His latest piece is his take on fintech, which has the main headline that fintech is taking away frictions in finance. FinTech to banking is like Skype to telecoms – drastically reducing margins; or like Netflix to Blockbuster – yes, some banks will go bust. 10 years from now, he predicts that one or two firms will have valuations of $250bn, the value of America’s biggest bank JP Morgan Chase, and maybe hadn’t noticed that Ant Financial is heading that way already. A further prediction is that the American internet giants won’t get into banking: I am “sceptical of the idea that one of the big tech players like Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon would also become a big player in financial services (due to) the traditional American aversion to combinations of banking and commerce and also that I thought privacy rules would preclude their using their massive data troves to drive lending activity”. This illustrates the difference between the Chinese internet giants – Baidu, Alibaba (Ant) and Tencent (WeChat) [BAT] – and the American ones: Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon [GAFA]. BATs are integrated versions of a Facebook, Amazon and PayPal in that they offer social, commercial and financial all-in-one apps.

Despite increased investment, the banking industry in the U.S. continues to lag other regions of the world in the development of meaningful digital innovation. This impacts customer experience, cost structures, as well as revenue opportunities. Historically, the banking industry in the U.S. has been slow to innovate compared to other industries. When asked why this may be, most industry studies found legacy back office infrastructures, the lack of leadership commitment (culture), regulations and compliance, organizational silos and the lack of budget to be inhibitors. Despite these limitations, the U.S. banking industry has tried to increase their focus on innovation through upper management commitment and support of innovation initiatives, development of innovation labs, increases in dedicated financing, and even an openness to invest in, or partner with, fintech firms. Some may question if the increased level of attention has had any measurable impact.

It’s also worth understanding that there is no upside to saying stuff like this. Because more often than not, you’ll find yourself on the wrong side of history like so many of these CEOs. And then we’ll make slides to immortalise your cluelessness – “neither Redbox nor Netflix are even on the radar screen in terms of competition” once said Blockbuster CEO…

Insurtech is moving beyond the early buzz created around P2P, drones, Blockchain and AI as concepts. The focus now is on solving actual pain points that the incumbent insurance industry fully recognises, the most pressing of which is how to better engage with customers. There is less hostile talk of disruption and more about the power of partnerships. The backdrop to all of this is the collapsing value chain in Insurance.

It’s been more than 25 years since Bill Gates dismissed retail banks as “dinosaurs,” but the statement may be as true today as it was then. Banking for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has been astonishingly unaffected by the rise of the Internet. Gates’ original quote contended that the dinosaurs can be ”bypassed.” If U.S. banks are going to survive the coming wave in financial technology (fintech), they’ll need to finally take digital transformation seriously. There are strategies that they can use to compete successfully online. The familiar David vs. Goliath script of the scrappy, internet-fueled startup vanquishing the clunky, brick-and-mortar-laden incumbent is repeated so often in startup circles that it is sometimes treated as inevitable. But in the real world, sometimes David wins, other times Goliath wins, and sometimes the right solution involves a combination of both. SME lending can remain a big business for banks, but only with deliberate choices about where to play and how to win. Banks must focus on areas where they can build a distinct competitive advantage, and find ways to partner with or learn from the new innovators.

Disruption is already here. It just isn’t widely distributed yet, as William Gibson famously said about the future.The open banking movement may eventually turn banks into app stores, where customers can consume products and services from a wide range of providers, all connected to a central banking utility. This platformification of banking, as Ron Shevlin calls it, is still very much a work in progress, but leading banks, such as BBVA, Capital One, Silicon Valley Bank, and others are actively developing APIs and working with fintech partners to connect and build new applications for customers. The result will be a massive reduction in operating expenses, and the ability to mass-customise products, features, and benefits to personalise the experience for banking customers. Exactly what most banks need, but you have to play to be able to win.

Investors are accustomed to the modern tech growth curve. Most funds have a three to five-year investment horizon. This means that investors inject capital into a business with the expectation of realising a return on that capital within that investment horizon. The problem is that finance is a very slow-moving sector. Whether you’re selling bank technology, small-business solutions, or acting as a lender, it takes time to break into the market. The tech idea that you must get big fast and dominate a sector is at odds with the slow-moving nature of finance, and lending in particular. Unfortunately, fintech companies often receive pressure from both existing and potential investors to demonstrate so-called “hockey stick” growth. This, in turn, leads to short-term thinking on behalf of the fintech company, which brings us to the second reason for the industry’s woes.

The revolution that fintech has started has a significant impact on the way we will live our lives. From how we pay for our coffee to what kind of retirement we will get. However, these are only the first-order consequences of fintech revolution. There will, surely, be the second and third order of consequences. For example, the way we transact will eventually impact the way we hire sales staff, which in turn will impact how we structure our companies and how we allocate capital. These changes are still hard to predict but something we need to start thinking about.

By Anne Leslie-Bini

“I want to create a lender that people don’t hate” said Denise Kingsmill, the chair of the board at U.K. challenger bank Monzo. Now there’s a pithy declaration that speaks volumes about the state of the banking industry and the times we live in. But how should we read this: are her comments simply savvy market positioning, tapping into the desiderata of a disillusioned digital generation? Or could this be something of greater substance: a refreshingly wholesome approach to rehabilitate an industry that historically ran on trust and bankrupted itself of its own currency during the global financial crisis? But here is the rub: even if challenger banks turn out to be ‘better’ banks from a customer experience perspective, is this enough? Can’t we, and shouldn’t we, expect more from the ‘banks of the future’?

The Ubers and TaskRabbits of the world fueled the creation of a whole new layer of the labor market, which now spans across (arguably) every imaginable industry. Just like with every new industry, the gig economy is now in need of products and services, designed specifically for its unique market. Finance and insurance products, are, of course, on top of that list. Already, many FIs have jumped on the gig bandwagon; GreenDot, for example, partnered with Uber and Mastercard last year to offer instant pay for on demand workers. Both insurtech and the freelance market have been on an upward curve lately. The CNBC estimated recently that over the past 20 years, the number of gig economy workers has increased by 27% more than regular payroll employees. In the meanwhile, reports suggest that between 2011 and 2017, VC funding for insurtech companies grew 31% annually. The two industries seem to be a match, made in fintech heaven.

Wave after wave of technology hits the bank, and the bank absorbs each wave and internalises the change. The issue is that, just like the fish, each wave is getting stronger. As digital transformation sweeps through the industry, the bank can resist each wave or swim to deeper waters. The banks that resist the digital waves are those who have millions of customers, billions of capital and centuries of history. The bank does not need to change so fast. The bank is robust, secure and resilient. The question today has to be: is it? As the digital waves hit, they are transforming the bank. Now, with open sourcing structures, billions of dollars are being invested in companies to transform the whole nature of finance. FinTech firms are reinventing the markets whilst cloud, AI and distributed ledgers are reinventing the back office. Through apps, APIs and analytics the bank is being open sourced. Without fundamental technology change and technology leadership, the bank is behaving like the fish by the shore. Wave after wave after wave of demand for technology change and digital transformation is hitting the bank, and the bank is just continuing to feed on past customer revenues, products and services.

Despite increased investment, the banking industry in the U.S. continues to lag other regions of the world in the development of meaningful digital innovation. This impacts customer experience, cost structures, as well as revenue opportunities. Historically, the banking industry in the U.S. has been slow to innovate compared to other industries. When asked why this may be, most industry studies found legacy back office infrastructures, the lack of leadership commitment (culture), regulations and compliance, organizational silos and the lack of budget to be inhibitors. Despite these limitations, the U.S. banking industry has tried to increase their focus on innovation through upper management commitment and support of innovation initiatives, development of innovation labs, increases in dedicated financing, and even an openness to invest in, or partner with, fintech firms. Some may question if the increased level of attention has had any measurable impact.

This Monday we had our first Fintech dinner and I’m pleased to say that it was very successful. I was so impressed by the people attending, thank you very much for making it happen, and for reading fintech summary! We all learned something new, met someone fascinating and had fun in the process. While this was the first, it certainly won’t be the last fintech dinner. Just reply to this email if you want to join the list to attend any of the future ones. I’ll keep you in the loop 🙂

Thanks for reading; YOU are awesome! Just hit reply if you want to get in touch 🙂

Before this seismic change, money didn’t matter. We shared beliefs that allowed us to live together in relative peace, but the creation of money changed the balance of humanity. Some of us became more powerful, whilst others weaker. In fact, the biggest change between the first age and the second age is that it is no longer muscle that wins. It’s brains. The reason I’m writing this is that I’m wondering about the future of money. If money is a myth, created by governments to control the masses. Then what happens if we have no money in the future? Stripping the world of the wealth focus and monetary controls could be an interesting future nirvana … or it could be anarchy and destruction.

The topic of artificial intelligence is dominating discussions of data management this year. But while a growing number of organizations are interested in AI, many don’t fully understand what the technology can do to help boost their customer engagement or the bottom line. AI promises to automate the process of understanding customers and anticipating their needs, then delivering the right experience to them at the right time. Organizations are hoping to impact the top line by acquiring new customers and increasing the value and lifetime of existing ones, and they’re hoping to impact the bottom line as well by reducing costs through automation. The primary challenge is and will always be the data. Data is the lifeblood of AI.

Blockchain networks tend to support principles, like open access and permissionless use, that should be familiar to proponents of the early internet. To protect this vision from political pressure and regulatory interference, blockchain networks rely on a decentralized infrastructure that can’t be controlled by any one person or group. Unlike political regulation, blockchain governance is not emergent from the community. Rather, it is ex-ante, encoded in the protocols and processes as an integral part of the original network architecture. To be a part of a community supporting a blockchain is to accept the rules of the network as they were originally established.

We have three major fintech models, each with their own unique blend of thinking. You have the Legacy West, the Growth East and the Innovative Emerging. If you’re looking for the next-generation financial system, you definitely will not find it in the Legacy West. That will show you the next generation of the existing system. You need to look to the emerging markets specifically, as they’re leapfrogging all of us. A great example is that the emerging economies will show us the next digital identity scheme, as this is critical to inclusion.

A true disruption of banking will only happen when startups find a way to blow up banking pricing models that used to sustain their business model. This is likely to come in a form of unbundling from the very core, such as deposit accounts. The reason it hasn’t happened yet is because banks are doing it better. There is an Achilles weakness, however, the lack of real-time transaction processing capability. Cracking that could provide a very real and serious edge over banking incumbents. Copying model app design is easy. Offering P2P loans is easy. Changing your core banking system is not. This would, indeed, prove that banking is necessary but banks are not.

Thanks for reading; YOU are awesome! Just hit reply if you want to get in touch 🙂

We know of two evident truths since the internet graced us with its presence. First, intermediators in any given industry will be disrupted as new business models emerge and effectively unbundle old paradigms. Second, this unbundling has not happened yet in the financial services. The question we are all working toward answering and in the process elevate to a third truth or disprove altogether is: will a great unbundling/rebundling occur in financial services? Suffice it to say, that, at a high level, new business models will disrupt old ones by unbundling their offering, rebundling new features/functionality and leverage at scale by aggregate attention as a result of said unbundling/rebundling. It is inevitable that credit intermediation will be upended as a result of this shift. How money is created as well as how capital requirements are engineered in the aggregate will have to be revisited should this model take hold at scale.

We are on the cusp of radical change. Some banks are leading this change, while some banks have no idea what change is coming. Bank is there as a trusted store of value. The lending part is now no longer important, as that can be done through alternative media such as peer-to-peer lenders. The bank’s risk management function is being eaten by software. This means that credit analytics, transparency and management of risk, and the democratisation of finance, is becoming a key change factor as people connect directly through marketplaces and platforms. Banking isn’t the end, but the means to the end. The end is what we’re buying and selling. A bank provides a method to enable that to happen, but software, platforms and marketplaces can just as easily provide that method in a far cheaper, faster and lower risk form.

Today, the industry is begging for a rewrite and a reengineering of the financial regulatory structures of yesteryear, giving hope to the current array of activities that have developed around cryptocurrencies. If that sounds far-fetched, remember that stocks were once considered a new asset class. The current asset classes include stocks, bonds and cash as ‘traditional assets’. Alternative assets include commodities, REITs, collectibles, insurance products, derivatives, foreign currency, venture capital, private equity and distressed securities. It is also worthy to note that the alternative asset classes have varying degrees of compliance requirements: from being regulated to non-regulated. Should regulators stop scratching their heads and treat cryptocurrencies simply as a new alternative asset class, we’ll be done with the debate. Hopefully, crypto will not take 20 years before the investment community buys into that concept wholeheartedly. These groups should note, it has already seen big successes. Bitcoin, ethereum and many other crypto projects have generated financial returns for their early investors, while creating a new economy – the blockchain economy. Just as Georges Doriot was credited for seeing that capital needed to get ‘creative’ to birth venture capital, we need to be creative today, in order to birth ‘crypto capital’. The difference now is we have a roadmap to replicate.

It’s hard to believe that the price of gold was fixed twice a day via conference call as recently as two years ago. In 2015, the London gold market (the largest in the world) switched to an electronic pricing system, broadening participation and, in theory, ending decades of opacity, inefficiency and occasional manipulation. However, the price is still fixed only twice a day and most trading of physical bullion still occurs on OTC markets, perpetuating the lack of transparency and cumbersome reconciliation. This partially explains the recent flurry of activity in gold trading technology. This past week alone, both Euroclear and the Royal Mint announced progress in testing blockchain-based gold trading. IEX also has trials under way, and the Canadian Royal Mint already allows the public to buy and sell bullion on a blockchain platform. A more liquid and verifiable market for physical gold could create greater trust in ‘digitized gold’ by lowering skepticism about price fixing and removing doubts about the authenticity of the underlying asset. Increased demand and a greater choice of vehicle is likely to further boost liquidity, which in turn would increase circulation. This would enhance gold’s functionality as collateral or even as a means of exchange. The greater the ‘usefulness’, the greater the value.